Weekly Blurb and Retirement Home

Perhaps someone has already done this, but I started to draft a little blurb to send to the guy at the Chicago Weekly who wanted to cover our project. Is this what we're going for? If you have any thoughts, feedback, or additions, please post them to the blog (or e-mail me) ASAP!

Also, Becca, Rachel, Mary and I will go going to the retirement home at 64th/Woodlawn tomorrow to hear some oral histories from the "old timers". If anyone wants to join us, we'll probably be heading over there at around 3:30. We haven't decided where we're meeting yet, but feel free to give me a call at (646)-373-1471 if you'd like to come along.

- Emma

THE BLURB:
The class is working together as a group to develop a project that will publicly address concerns we have regarding development in the Woodlawn community. As we envision it, the result will be a site-specific event that will draw members of both the University and Woodlawn communities to an empty lot located on the southeast corner of 63rd street and Ingleside avenue.) At this space, we will create the floor plan for a residential apartment building and place a variety of domestic furniture to symbolically highlight what may have once been on the site. Food will also be a central component of the event, as we hope it will help draw more people to the site. At the site as well as at several peripheral locations, we will distribute pamphlets explaining our project as well as the history of the area. The aesthetic of our promotional material will play off of MAC Management's graphic and corporate identity. We hope that this tactic will ensure greater visibility for our project as well as call attention to present-day changes in the housing market that threaten to and actually do displace people from their communities. Nevertheless, our goal is not to simply make a visual statement but rather to draw people together in a way that promotes and encourages discussion, conversation, and perhaps even argument over the issues at hand.

C.O.U.C.H. Flickr

In response to the growing need for a good photo hosting site, I created a flickr for the group. To access it/post items, just go to flickr.com and sign in, using couch.project as the user id and flickr as the password.

Mock flyer

I've been trying to think of some different ways we can advertise/subvertise our project, and I came up with this mock flyer. My goal was to spoof the bullshit hospitality of furniture/real estate companies and the sort of "flyer aesthetic" on campus. Let me know what you think and if you want to use something like this with our other ads.

"Creative Destruction"

In another class I’m taking, we have been discussing the idea of "creative destruction", which was put forth by Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore in the introduction to a volume they edited, titled Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe. In the book’s introduction, "Cities and the Geographies of Actually Existing Neoliberalism”, Brenner and Theodore discuss the economic and political policies of the 90s, which essentially dismantled the Keynesian structures of government that had been in place since the Depression. I’m sure we’re all familiar with the results: corporate taxes were cut, public welfare and aid programs were curtailed, capital was withdrawn from “blighted areas”, and spaces opened up that allowed private interests and groups to fill the gaps the government had vacated. What Brenner and Theodore mean by “creative destruction” is the process by which existing structures or institutions are selectively favored and upheld or, alternately, destroyed. In the latter case, there is still room for a creative impulse, but resources may be diverted away from one space in favor of another. Of course, this brief overview doesn’t fully explain the extent of the changes wrought in this period, but it is worth considering the links between the last process I noted, in which spaces were either invested in or dis-invested from, in relation to our project.

What happened on 63rd street, as outlined by Will in his presentation, is a particularly potent example of the concept of “creative destruction”. The choice to take down the El involved a calculated decision; judgment was passed on the area. It drew attention but, ultimately, it was deemed not worthy of money or interest. Yet there was also a creative process that accompanied this destruction. The energy and resources that might have been invested in the area took a different trajectory and were invested elsewhere in the city. Many of Chicago’s current divisions seem to stem from this differentiated application of value across urban space.

Of course, what we’re now seeing in Woodlawn is yet another form of “creative destruction”. Depending on your viewpoint, I suppose you could see the new investment, building, and other activity as either creative or destructive. I would suggest that the neighborhood simultaneously belongs to several different real and imagined realms, straddling them all at once. It is an imagined, barren nothingness, yet its empty lots embody a real sense of vacancy. It is an area with an almost mythical past of commercial activity and intense social agitation, but it is also a grouping of actual spaces of habitation, work, worship, and community. It seems apparent that our project will be addressing these issues of the imagined versus the real Woodlawn, but it is also worth considering how these notions are produced, why we have them, and how spatial bias and appropriation operates, both in the past and the present.

If you read all the way through this…well, I didn’t expect you to, but thank you. If you have comments, etc., please let everyone know.

more logos

there's a small version of the logo. if you need a big one, it's here:
http://christopheraque.com/COUCH/COUCH-logo.jpg

illustrator logo

yo,

i uploaded an illustrator version of the logo, so we can reproduce this as big as we want since it's all vectored and stuff. or at least that's how my limited graphic design knowledge goes.

i'll post a jpeg version later (once i figure how)

chris

download:
http://www.christopheraque.com/COUCH/COUCHlogo.ai

Banner Pricing

Here

Or, at the Fedex/Kinkos in HP, Color is 12.99/sq.ft and B&W is 8.99/sq.ft.

Office Depot is not cool enough to do prices per square foot, so here's the list:

2x4 : 59.99

2x6 : 89.99

2x8 : 119.99

2x10 : 139.99

3x4 : 89.99

3x6 : 129.99

3x8 : 165.99

At Bronzeville Signs & Printing, Vinyl Color and B&W is 7.00/sq.ft., and if we need a heavier vinyl it's 9.00/sq.ft.

I checked mostly for Hyde Park or internet printing services, and these are the cheapest I found. We'll probably need to place our order fairly soon. Does anyone know how big the MAC signs are? If possible with the design group and advertising group, I'd like to place our order by the end of the week.

V & Me

Well there is furniture to be found on craigslist, however, I now second Vicki's notion that Gas money would be an appreciated item on budgetary Koncerns, and that we might use a truck, her & I, and go blitzkrieg it one day because i'm sure the freebies seem like ripe strawberries.

http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/zip/669911306.html uh ye ye pulp

http://chicago.craigslist.org/chc/zip/670462986.html schnauzer




Free for the taking, we put the couch outside so anyone can come by and take it. It's located on 1098 spring green dr. Joliet.

Stores on 63rd

So I found some useful map images of 63rd street after talking to the people in the Maps collections. The first one is from the 1930s and it gives a breakdown of the stores along the street as well as who owned them at the time.

http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/e/su/maps/chisoc/G4104-C6-2W9Q4-1930z-U5.html

There is also a set of map images copyrighted in the 1950s but were apparently made in 1926. You can access them through this website:

http://sanborn.umi.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/

Click on Browse Maps, then select the state (Illinois), the city (Chicago), and the date (1905-1951). At the top under "Select a volume" select vol. 16 1926-Oct 1950, the plate numbers we would probably use are 27-32 and 40-46. No blueprints though, but from the looks of it they were mainly retail shops, a barber shop, and even a gallery.

If anyone wants to (and would like to do me a big favor since I'm finishing my BA that's due tomorrow) you can get a better image through microfilms. I have the microfilm call numbers, so if anyone is up for the task, message me and I can give them to you. Sorry I couldn't find any blueprints (or any maps later than 1930).